Archive for April, 2016

During the maintenance window there will be expected email downtime of between 30-60 minutes. During the email downtime users will be unable to login, retrieve or send email. Incoming emails will be stored in our backup email server and delivered to your inbox shortly after the maintenance is complete.

After the email server maintenance is completed, there will be a short, 5-10 minute scheduled maintenance for the sites and manage portal. A maintenance message will be displayed to users when the sites and manage portal are not available.

The 4/27 email maintenance will be the final step of our hardware upgrade migration. For questions, comments or concerns please email support@storesecured.com

Recently we have gotten a few queries from customers after the switch to using the CloudFlare services and I wanted to take a explain caching for those of you who are curious.

Part of the service that CloudFlare offers by default is a caching mechanism which saves your stores images, css and js files across the globe. This makes the sites load very quickly as the files can come from a server that is located very geographically close to the end user. See the map of CloudFlare’s data centers here https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map/ .

StoreSecured tells CloudFlare how long to save static content and then once a single customer has requested a file, that file is ready for the duration of the cache period for super quick loading from the CloudFlare servers and it also tells the user to cache locally (this was done previously as well). Please note that it is a best practice on the web to cache static content like images, css, and js files and to use a CDN like CloudFlare to do so. Cache is especially important for images that are part of your store template, ie those that are on each page of your website as once a user loads a file once on the first page load there is no need for them to need to load it again, this makes subsequent page loads much quicker.

What happens when you want to change an image or css/js file and want everyone to see it right away? Here is where caching can be more of a pain for you as the site owner/updater. If the image is cached then users will still see the old image until the cache time period has expired. The way around this is to give the new image a new name. This will ensure that the new image is immediately downloaded and viewed by everyone. Yes, this can be a pain but there is a big trade off here in site loading time for your users.

By default all StoreSecured sites are operating on a 4 hour cache with CloudFlare. This number can be increased, decreased or the cache can be removed (not recommended but it is an option if requested). To change the default number of hours to cache for your site please contact us via support ticket with the new cache time. A separate cache expiration can also be set for different folders in your site if desired.

Hint: The longer that files can be cached the more efficient/quick loading your site will be. If your images do not change often and you are comfortable with renaming them when they do change then we recommend at least a 1 week cache expiration.

If you view your StoreSecured statistics often you may also have noted that the number of hits shown in your statistics file has gone down since you switched over to using CloudFlare. This is normal and a good thing and again this is attributed to caching. This has nothing to do with visitors to your site. The hits is an indication of how many different files that users request when they come to your site. A single page view can generate hundreds of hits, ie each image, css and js file that is needed to load a page is a hit. Thus when a file gets cached it no longer has to be requested from the StoreSecured servers and your hit counts go down. This also reduces the amount of bandwidth that your site uses. Your visitor count in the stats should mostly remain the same but may go down slightly due to new protection features that block bad bots, spammers and attackers. Since those people never reach the site their visit is no longer counted.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns please contact us at support@storesecured.com.

If your store is only available at a subdomain, for instance, mystore.storesecured.com or mystore.easystorecreator.com the below information does NOT apply.
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In order to take full advantage of the planned upgrades and for a more seamless transition we urge all customers who are currently using Rackspace nameservers to update your domain nameservers.

ONLY the two CloudFlare name servers should be present. All other nameservers must be removed.

Your website will not experience any downtime when you change your nameservers.

How do I change nameservers?
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Nameservers can be changed at your domain name registrar, ie the company who you pay your yearly domain name fee to. Some examples of domain name registrars are network solutions and godaddy.

Why do I need to do this?
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We are transitioning all merchants who use the Rackspace DNS to Cloudflare DNS for their advanced zone apex management and traffic protection. The Rackspace DNS is older and does not provide the necessary support and automated management. All sites WILL continue to function even if the change is NOT made but we will be unable to automatically route your shoppers to the least busy server.

Special notes and considerations
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If you use your domain name for any services outside of StoreSecured, ie 3rd party email or websites please let us know so that we can ensure your setup is correct for the switch over.

Questions
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If you have any questions, comments or concerns please contact support at support@storesecured.com, we would be happy to help.

During the maintenance window there will be expected downtime of between 30-60 minutes during which a maintenance message will be shown in place of the sites. For the remainder of the maintenance period sites will be running but with expected slower then normal response times.

The manage portal and ftp servers will be set to maintenance mode during maintenance and store owners will be unable to login or make changes to sites.

ONLY the two CloudFlare name servers should be present. All other nameservers must be removed.

Your website will not experience any downtime when you change your nameservers.

How do I change nameservers?
==================================
Nameservers can be changed at your domain name registrar, ie the company who you pay your yearly domain name fee to. Some examples of domain name registrars are network solutions and godaddy.

Why do I need to do this?
==================================
We are transitioning all merchants who use the Rackspace DNS to Cloudflare DNS for their advanced zone apex management and traffic protection. The Rackspace DNS is older and does not provide the necessary support and automated management. If the change is NOT made your site WILL continue to function however we will be unable to automatically route traffic to the best available server.

What is CloudFlare?
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CloudFlare offers regular DNS services along with traffic acceleration, DDOS protection and a worldwide CDN. As part of the DNS switch you will later be able to activate CloudFlare’s advanced features on your site. You can read more about Cloudflare athttps://blog.storesecured.com/2016/02/02/cloudflare/
andhttp://www.cloudflare.com

Special notes and considerations
==================================
If you use your domain name for any services outside of StoreSecured, ie 3rd party email or websites please let us know so that we can ensure your setup is correct for the switch over.

Questions
==================================
If you have any questions, comments or concerns please contact support at support@storesecured.com, we would be happy to help.